A blog to share security, networking and cloud related technology information as @vCloudernBeer picked up on his search for his destiny in the cloud. (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chowanthony)

Monday, September 1, 2014

VMware NSX and HP VAN SDN Controller - a value added solution

I am a software developer and for a long time when I
implement a feature SNMP support for the feature is always done last and
sometime delayed to a future release.Back then, functionality of the feature was the most important thing in
my mind.As I venture into server
virtualization, I start to see the perspective of a system administrator or a
network administrator.Monitoring and
reporting is very important and sometimes more important than a feature set
delivered by the vendor.Of course
maintaining the five 9s of uptime is always the highest priority.

These days I am looking into NSX.Derek Seaman has a blog post
on “VMworld 2014: Future Direction of NSX” where he summarize session NET1674.Chris Wahl has a post on NSX 6.1 (4.2 for
the NSX Multi-hypervisor).

I came across an article
with the title “The industry’s east-west
federated solution”.

After reading the title, 2 questions come to my mind.What is:

East-West traffic?

The solution for what problem?

East-West
Traffic

In simple term, east-west traffic refers to the traffic
between servers in a data center.There
is another term – north south traffic and this refers to the traffic between
clients and servers in a data center.Traffic from client to the server will be northern bound traffic while
traffic from server to the client is called southern traffic.

First of all what is this solution? What problem is this trying to solve?The problem is that virtual network has not
visibility to the physical network.For
a user or virtualization/network administrator this is not a big problem.This will just be an inconvenience because there
are tools to monitor, view and debug the virtual and physical network
individual.At the end of the day, user
still has the tools to perform their job.

From the perspective of automation or orchestration, this is
a big problem.

A
Federated Solution

Why federated?The
solution calls for a federation of 2 products to solve the problem.The 2 products are VMware’s NSX and HP’s VAN
Controller which one of HP’s SDN solution.

VMware
NSX

Tons of information can be found about VMware’s NSX.Not too many people have the luxury of having
the opportunity to play around with this product.In VMworld 2014, VMware announced a new certification
track for Network Virtualization which has high NSX concentration.Information on this certification track can
be found here.

As of this writing, I see on twitter that a few people had
sit for the VCP-NV certification and a few already achieved VCDX-NV status and
they we being introduced on VMworld 2nd day Keynote session.The VCIX-NV is not available yet and this
should be equal as getting a VCAP level certification and one of the requirements
to sit for this certification is a person is a CCNP or CCIE holder.This requirement shows that VMware is trying
to get Cisco certification holders to get into VMware’s SDN solution.

When we look at VMware NSX, we can approach this from 2
angels.Its capabilities and its
components

VMware’s NSX has the following Capabilities:

Logical Switches

Logical Routers

Logical Firewall

Logical VPN

Logical Load Balancer

VMware’s NSX has the following components

NSX Manager

NSX vSwitch

NSX Controller

NSX Edge

All the NSX components can be configured using vSphere
Client, VMware command line interface (CLI) and REST API.

The REST API is essential for 3rd party software
entities to interface with NSX.

HP’s
SDN Technology

This page
contains a very comprehensive description of HP’s SDN technology.One of HP’s SDN offering is HP
Virtual Application Network SDN Controller.It is described as a control point
in an OpenFlow-enabled network, simplifying management, provisioning, and
orchestration. This enables delivery of a new generation of application-based
network services and provides open application program interfaces (APIs) that
allow third-party developers to deliver innovative solutions to dynamically
link business requirements to network infrastructure via either custom Java
programs or general-purpose RESTful control interfaces. HP VAN SDN Controller
Software is designed to operate in campus, data center, or service provider
environments

This HP VAN SDN controller is recommended to run on an
Ubuntu 64-bit server with 12.04 LTS.It requires
a back end database.The recommended database
platform is PostgreSQL 9.1.OpenJDK 7
JVM is also required.

Integrating
VMware and HP’s solution

The 2 companies has entered into a joint development of a
solution that will combine the strength of the 2 SDN solutions that according
to a white
paperto provide customers unified
automation and visibility of the physical and virtual data center networks,
enabling business agility and improving
business continuity.

The integration of the 2 controllers is using OSVDB (Open
vSwitch Database Management Protocol).The HP controller is acting as an OSVDB server while the VMware NSX
controller is acting as an OSVDB client.Both controller are able to communicate with each other via the OSVDB
federated API.

HP blog is saying the integration is at the control
plan.When I look into OSVDB, I believe
this should be the combination of the management and control plan where OSVDB
is for management similar to NETCONF and control plan is where the OpenFlow
protocol resides in which is being use to program traffic flows.

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